Grime Read Free Page A

Because I’m just like Mom.”
    “You’re not like Mom.”
    “It’s easier to have somebody there, even a
shitbag like Greg, then to be alone. She could never figure out how
to be alone. I envy people who know how to be alone. Who just say
fuck it, you know? This is me. I am me. I am not a piece of anybody
else’s anything. If I meet somebody that gets me, awesome. If I
don’t, fuck it. Who cares? I always used to look at Mom and wish
she could be like that, and now I look at me and I wish I could be
like that. But really, part of me just looks at people who are like
that and I just think, what the fuck is wrong with you?”
    “You’re so full of shit.”
    “I know.” She glances over, a twisted grin
pulling at one corner of her mouth. “Now it’s your turn. You say
something.”
    “You think that rambling turn of nonsense you
just did counts as saying something?”
    “I think it’s your turn.”
    I think for a minute. I can feel the thing I
want to say banging against that cage inside. It wants out. “I
don’t think you’re like Mom because you think you’re like Mom.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “I mean, Mom never actually thought about
herself.”
    Jamie turns and looks straight at me for
longer than I’d like her to, considering she’s behind the wheel.
“She killed herself when she had four kids, Mitchell. If you ask me
that’s pretty selfish.”
    “That’s not what I mean. I just mean, I don’t
think she ever sat down and considered what she was doing with her
life. She was never the introspective sort.”
    “Why do you think that?”
    “Because if she had been, she would have
changed it. She wouldn’t have stayed in a life that made her
miserable.”
    “God, you’re a fucking idiot.” Jamie shakes
her head. “Have you ever, I don’t know, been a real person? Talked
to one? People don’t change their life when they realize how shitty
it is. They just bitch about it.”
    “I changed mine,” I say.
    “Did you really? Or did you just change the
zip code?”
    I don’t have a response to that. I turn up
the radio and she takes the hint. We don’t talk for a while. The
GPS tells us to turn left. Without it we probably would have gone
right past the small wooden sign for the Madison Prairie Landfill.
I wonder if they did that on purpose.
    We pay the fee and I guide Jamie while she
backs up the trailer. Unloading occupies us enough that we don’t
feel the need to talk, but before long we’re back in the truck and
headed back for the house. We just listen to the radio.
    When we pull up there’s a red sports car
parked on the curb. Not a new one. Not a nice one. I don’t know
much about cars, but it looks kind of 80s, like the kind of car
somebody would desperately hold onto in the hopes that one day it
will be considered a classic.
    There’s a huge pile of trash bags waiting
beside the driveway. Jamie starts loading them into the trailer
right away, but I go inside first.
    The front room is empty, except for a couple
of boxes. “Val?”
    “In the kitchen.”
    I start to walk back and Gwen appears from
the hallway. “Hey, Mitch.”
    “Well, look who finally showed up.”
    “Go fuck yourself. Hug me.”
    She looks exactly the same as she did all
those years ago, those six months when she came and lived with me
after she graduated high school because she had the same delusions
every other kid in a flyover state has about California. She’s even
dressed the same, like fashion had reached its apex in the mid-90s.
Or maybe it just gave up and died.
    As long as it’s been since I’ve seen her,
hugging her is easy and familiar. I can’t deny Gwen was always my
favorite. Just a year younger than Jamie and me, and about as
different from me as you can get, but maybe that’s why she always
felt more like my other half than my twin did. She could always
make me laugh. Why the hell aren’t I better at keeping in touch?
Seeing her now I realize how much I’ve actually missed the